As Pima County approaches its two-year COVID-19 anniversary, nearly 70% of eligible residents here ages 5 and older have been vaccinated with either two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson shot. 

"That's an amazing figure" and "a sign of some really good progress," Dr. Francisco Garcia, the county's chief medical officer, said Thursday.

About 40% of the eligible population here has received a booster, he said. 

"That's not enough, but given when they first became available, it's a positive story to tell," he said. 

Positivity rate
remains high

Even with those vaccination rates, however, it's still a struggle to manage the virus in a way that enables hospitals, schools and communities to function more normally. 

County numbers show the positivity rate for coronavirus tests here hit 28% the week of Jan. 16 and, as of Thursday, appear to be dipping, to 25%. That's still far from what's considered workable, which is 3%, Garcia said. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's seven-day rolling average for Pima County was a 33% positivity rate.) 

"Right in the middle of summer, we were in the 3% range and that's the last time we were that low," Garcia said. "That's where we should be, that's where we should live, in that range." 

Part of the reason so many people are testing positive is due to the current variant, omicron, which is highly transmissible. The other reason is that the number of people remaining unvaccinated is still too high, and that's allowing new variants to take hold, Garcia said. The latest one? A new version of omicron that's spreading in Asia and Europe. 

"What can we do to be prepared? What we can do is be as vaccinated as possible," he said. "A new variant doesn't take hold in a community unless you have a susceptible population." 

Currently, Garcia said, about two-thirds of the people here needing hospitalization or an emergency room visit for the virus are unvaccinated — and the one-third who are fully vaccinated but hospitalized are mostly elderly residents or those with compromised immune systems. 

The antiviral medications and other therapeutic tools for those who get sick are being made available by the federal government only in "dribs and drabs," he said, and no one should be counting on those medications being available right now if they get sick. 

"And that's why vaccination still has to be our go-to," he said. 

The second anniversary of COVID-19 arriving in Arizona comes at a time when the state's known death toll from the virus is nearly 26,000.

Arizona's first coronavirus case was recorded on Jan. 26, 2020. Pima County had its first case recorded on March 4, 2020. 

School tests
are needed 

The county Health Department is still trying to keep up supplies for school testing, particularly tests students who have tested positive can do at home to see when they can return, but supplies are limited.

A week ago the federal government announced it would be shipping out rapid tests people can do at home, and those are the same tests the county needs for several of its testing environments, including schools, Garcia said. 

"There is a lot of demand for those tests and the federal government has sequestered a lot of those supplies," he said, adding that school districts are the county's priority.

"Do we have more demand than we have tests today? Absolutely."

Garcia said two of the county's large school districts, Sunnyside and Tucson Unified, should soon receive testing kits directly from federal suppliers. 

Hospitals are in
precarious spot

Additionally, he said the omicron's impact on hospitals "continues to be very, very devastating." 

"If we have reached a high water mark in terms of the number of cases, we have not reached a high water mark as far as the number of hospitalizations," he said, explaining that a person who gets infected today could become an intensive care admission a week or two after the infection begins. 

Garcia said when he speaks with hospital CEOs or chief medical officers, he's hearing that the county's hospital employees are "stressed, stretched, fatigued." In recent weeks, there are times when there's only enough remaining staffers to attend to one or two more ICU beds. 

"I think that to a certain extent, as a population, we've become deaf to some of these things," he said. "We've been doing this for two years now." 

What he fears is needing many more ICU beds but not having the staffing capability. 

"God forbid a school bus gets hit or some mass casualty event happens," Garcia said, adding that those patients would need to be "transported out of the county and, perhaps, out of state." 

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Contact reporter Patty Machelor at 806-7754 or pmachelor@tucson.com